I recently came across a new podcast over at QZ, addressing the issue of whether all technology is good all the time, called Should This Exist?
Questions about neurohacking, CRISPR babies, empathetic robots, etc. abound, but it’s obvious, a lot of tech is not good at all.
Neurohacking, where you either use drugs or electricity to stimulate the laying down of memory pathways in the brain might be great, right? But since we just barely learned how the brain works, and not even that, entirely, I’d rather stick to practicing my skills and using something like Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP – confusingly the same acronym as Natural Language Processing) to get me there. And it was scientists who told us that SSRIs would solve all our emotional problems, not understanding that removing the SSRIs would result in neurochemical imbalances in the brain for, possibly, the rest of the user’s life.
CRISPR could be great at saving lives and eliminating genetic disease, but could also be used for what racist scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries called Eugenics. I don’t know if humans are yet wise enough to wield such powerful technology.
And of course, Big Data looms over all. A lot of people don’t want their data out there. A lot of people believe that our data will be misused by corporations, governments and law enforcement. Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
I don’t know what Liberty means today, and I’m not sure what Safety is, either. Is Liberty being able to do things without anyone’s knowledge? Or is Liberty being free do what we want. I’m a big fan of Benjamin Franklin, but I’m an even bigger fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His Four Freedoms speech defined what we, as society, should be aiming for for all our citizens.
And if we’re looking for universal Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear, technology supports those things. Technology has enabled so much Free Speech right now that it’s actually a burden to call out idiots on their racism and ignorance. Even if you live in deepest, darkest Mississippi, you can choose your faith, and you can be an active online member of any religious community. We haven’t reached Freedom from Want, but technology, as always, could get us there–the main block to advances on the Want front come from greedy, frightened humans. Lastly, how do we free ourselves from Fear? Education and knowledge are the only medicines for that, and technology is bringing (along with all that mucky free speech) more information to more people than ever before.
And it can be scary that the G-MAFIA tracks almost all our public data. But when one of them went rogue, selling our private data to Russians (Facebook), a lot of people called them out. Were they pilloried? Pretty much, yes. But they weren’t forced out of business. We like their business, and the Russians and Cambridge Analytica paid them to buy our publicly shared information. I don’t know, but if you’re shocked by a business selling what you give them for free, you really need to bone up on your privacy practices.
In the end, things that exist exist, and those pesky, curious humans will not stop inventing new, ever more dangerous tools. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Far better to try to process our anxieties and agree through the social contract what appropriate protocols should be put in place.